1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to power management, and more particularly to a low power standby circuit and method for a LCD computer display.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video interface standard developed, by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG), to enhance the visual performance of digital display devices such as liquid crystal display (LCD) computer displays. According to the DVI standard, the brightness of associated pixels is transmitted as uncompressed binary data stream to the display.
The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is another, but recently adopted, video interface standard developed also to transmit uncompressed digital data stream to the display devices such as LCD computer displays and digital televisions. As the DVI signal is electrically compatible with HDMI video signal, the HDMI is backward compatible with the DVI.
The growing demands for portable or battery-powered electronic devices call for longer operating time. The battery power, however, could not keep up with pressing need of longer operating time for the modern electronic devices. Reducing power consumption is thus becoming an alternative and more feasible way to reach that object. For a next-generation or a proprietary power saving protocol, the maximum power consumption of the LCD monitor control integrated circuit (IC) of the display device shall conform to being as low as, for example, 0.5 W in the standby mode. According to that protocol, the display controller in the display device is allocated maximum 20 mA of current. However, a substantive portion, for example, half of the allocated 20 mA is usually wastefully drawn.
For the reason that conventional display controller could not effectively save further power to conform to modern power saving protocol, a need has arisen to propose a low power standby mechanism for substantially saving power consumption.